In: Biology
You hypothesize that place cells that fire in sequence are recurrently connected with higher probability than would be expected randomly. Design an experiment to test this. Include all aspects of the experiment, including behavioral paradigm, physiological recording method, and method to determine connectivity between recorded neurons, in your answer.
Place cells are a set of neurons that mainly help in locating goal and navigation.These are seen in primates,rats ,rodents,hippocampus etc..
For our experiment we can take rats as the model organism since it is easy to fix head gears.Make a square around the rat by assuming it as their place field and now keep any food items in there.And keep noteing the firing of the place cells with multuarray electrodes and using microscope to view the activity of place cells physiologically.We can see that the rat will locate the food using the place cells and thus we can find out whether the place cells work with connections.